IRONIES abound in “Hollywoodland,” in which fallen Hollywood golden boy Ben Affleck returns to the screen after a two-year absence to give a haunting performance as George Reeves, TV’s ill-fated Superman of the 1950s.

When a harness breaks during a flying scene and dumps Reeves onto the floor, he dusts himself off and deadpans, “I’d like to thank the Academy . . .” It’s funny on several levels, not least because Affleck shared an Oscar for Best Original Screenplay for “Good Will Hunting” back in 1998, when he was just 26.

Even more significantly, there’s buzz that Affleck’s superb work as Reeves could bring him an Academy nomination for Best Supporting Actor for “Hollywoodland,” a terrific film noir that also stars Adrien Brody, Diane Lane and Bob Hoskins. It premieres today at the Venice Film Festival and opens in the United States on Sept. 8.

The idea of mentioning Affleck in the same sentence as an Oscar would have seemed ludicrous a couple of years ago, when the actor seemingly committed career suicide with a long string of bad movies and a high-profile engagement to Jennifer Lopez (his co-star in the notorious “Gigli”) that made him a laughingstock.

Three more flops and the tabloid-ready collapse of the Affleck-Lopez engagement followed. The last one, the comedy “Surviving Christmas,” was dead on arrival in October 2004.

A talented actor in smaller movies like “Chasing Amy,” “Boiler Room” and “Changing Lanes,” he seemed content to coast by on his charm in poorly written big-studio productions like “Armageddon” and “Pearl Harbor,” not to mention two widely ridiculed franchises, “The Sum of All Fears” (as superspy Jack Ryan) and “Daredevil.”

Perhaps the low point came when his “Pearl Harbor” performance was immortalized in a song in “Team America: World Police”: “I need you like Ben Affleck needs acting school.”

Affleck has spent most of the last two years largely out of the public eye, marrying Jennifer Garner, having a child and quietly returning to his roots in indie films, a standard rehab strategy for fading stars.

The low-budget “Man About Town,” in which Affleck plays a Hollywood agent, found no buyers on the festival circuit last year. But Affleck was able to make his feature directing debut with “Gone, Baby, Gone” a crime thriller starring his brother Casey that he recently wrapped in their hometown of Boston.

And then there’s “Hollywoodland,” in which Affleck taps into his own career frustrations and ambivalent relationship with fame to illuminate the role of Reeves, whose mysterious death by gunshot was ruled a suicide but may have been linked to one of the two women in his life.

Affleck, who wears a prosthetic nose and sings several songs in Spanish, nails Reeves’ selfdeprecating charm and the poignancy of an actor who became famous to a young audience who couldn’t distinguish between him and the character he was playing.

This comes most notably in a scene during which a terrified Reeves, in costume as Superman, has to confront a youngster who has brought a loaded gun to fire at his superhero.

“The response to Ben’s performance has been amazing across the board,” says James Schamus of Focus Features, which is distributing “Hollywoodland.”

“Ben has given excellent performances before, but this is the one that I believe will solidify his standing as a very fine actor.”

Schamus says Affleck actively campaigned for the role and intensively researched Reeves’ life.

Talking to reporters at the movie’s press junket in Los Angeles recently, Affleck said he was now more interested in good scripts and less concerned about money than in the past.

“It got to a point in my life where what was available to me was much more interesting stuff that wasn’t about money, it wasn’t about big poster movies,” he said, “This was kind of a low-budget movie and kind of an experiment in storytelling that was about a dark subject.”